Long Careers, Busy Years

Reflecting on some of the best experimental sounds of the year.

In this edition of The Out Door, Marc Masters surveys the wide sound-world of one of his favorite artists of the year, French-born artist Félicia Atkinson, and explores work by women who struck a balance between internal control and external chaos. Grayson Haver Currin dives into the "continuous music" of one of his favorite artists of the year, Lubomyr Melnyk, and gets to the heart of two great 2013 LPs by duos. (Remember to follow us on Twitter and Tumblr for all types of experimental music news and information.)

I: Control and chaos

Subjective reality: Letha Rodman Melchior

Lately, whenever I think about my favorite experimental music of 2013, I keep realizing how arbitrary list-making is. For any ten records I might choose, there are likely another 100 I haven’t even heard that are just as good, maybe even better. There’s too much good experimental music being made to even pretend I’ve heard a large percentage. I have some say in what I listen to, of course, but whatever does cross my path gets there partially through a random confluence that could’ve easily gone another way.

Perhaps making best-of lists is a way to fight that randomness–to find order inside the chaos of endless music. But it’s a losing battle, since lists inevitably oversimplify, and so many get made they create their own chaos. There’s something liberating about that, though. If I think of it all as chaos, something I can only react to rather than control, trying to figure it all out seems less important. For example, I’ve noticed that my favorites this year have included lots of female artists. I don’t know if this is due to any trend outside of my own listening, and I’m not sure I even could know. After all, from my limited perspective, it could all just be random.

Thinking this way has led me to an interesting coincidence: many of these favorite records seem to actually be about dealing with chaos, trying to make sense of it without oversimplifying it. In other words, music that’s personal and controlled yet still lets the arbitrary randomness of the world in. The external awareness in these works is often literal – many of these artists use the natural sounds of the world around them to mimic their internal monologues, and help give the listener a sense of what it’s like in there.

I hear that in the brain-wave improvisations of Ghil, in which cellist Okkyung Lee responds to the chaos of reality with something even more chaotic: her own stream of musical consciousness. The subdued half-songs of Ashley Paul’s Line the Cloudshave a deceptive passivity, as if Paul is letting the world seep into her melodies, wrapping around them like overgrown grass. On Nouskaa Henget, Marja Johansson (aka Tsembla) crafts bubbling electronics that bounce around chaotically like electrons in the throes of quantum chance.

Rachel Evans’ Motion Sickness of Time Travel continues to treat sound as an eternal flow to tap into, and this year that part of that tapping led her to create a trilogy of one-track CDr’s (each a “ballade” for a different “moon”) that were particularly attuned to the rhythms and interruptions of natural chaos. Lynn Fister’s Watery Starve press openly embraced the world's mossy sprawl, wrapping her cassette releases in leaves and feathers, and making music as Aloonaluna that stretched and breathed with atmospheric beauty. Her double-cassette compilation Taxidermy of Unicorns, which included herself, Evans, Felicia Atkinson (see our profile of her in section III), and Alicia Merz, felt like a watershed, and one of 2013’s prime musical accomplishments.

Three records this year particularly struck me as deep explorations of personal control and universal chaos. Bérangère Maximin’sInfinitesimal is so alive with the sounds of the external world that I initially couldn't locate her musical voice inside all of the activity. But as the album proceeds, ghosts of order emerge, through glimpses of symmetrical shapes and flashes of matching colors. Slowly, Infinitesimal establishes internal logic, matching the way things make sense in your head even if you can’t explain them. Maximin credits herself only with “voice, laptop, and various objects,” but she uses those minimal tools to drill a bottomless sound-well. And where previous records were more collaborative, Infinitesimal feels like her most personal statement yet.

Olivia Block’sKarrenopens with a big bang–a crunch of blasting noise that seems to say “brace yourself.” The rest of side-long opener “Foramen Magnum” alternates between distant sounds and more sudden eruptions. Though Block’s timing is fine-tuned, the piece feels as chaotic as the environment; in fact, much of “Foramen Magnum” comprises field recordings “taken from orchestral rehearsals and various public locations, including museums and zoos.” Block makes it sound like it could be all happening in her head or outside her window—or, more likely, both. After all, “Foramen Magnum” means an opening at the base of the human skull, and the piece (as well as it’s side B counterpart, the more overtly orchestral “Opening Night”) helps Karren become a kind of portal between the inner mind and the external universe.

But for me the 2013 record that most effectively grapples with inner and outer universes is Letha Rodman Melchior's Handbook for Mortals. Over the course of 11 brief, impressionistic vignettes, Melchior traces a sound-world that feels utterly private and subjective, as if you're seeing through her eyes. At times her pieces have a surreal, under-water quality, but she always lets reality creep or burst in. The way she adds field recordings, like a TV playing across the room or a conversation held on the other side of a wall, reminds me of how Daniel Johnston added snippets of unrehearsed dialogue to his early cassettes. But where those played like skits, Melchior’s found sounds are woven into the fabric of her music, such that a struck chord and a distant voice can have the same hypnotic effect.

Melchior has spoken eloquently about her attraction to field recordings, and the idea of sound as music. “From early on, I found that I liked listening to blended sounds of familiar things; TV, lawnmowers, children playing outside,” she says in notes for the album. “When I lived in Chinatown on Canal Street in New York, I loved to lay in bed and listen to the vendors shouting, blending with the heavy traffic and tiny wind chimes; I would pretend I was someplace else, somewhere I didn’t know. I love that feeling.” That sums up Handbook for Mortals’ unique accomplishment: rather than trying to control the chaos of the world, she makes it her music, and in the process takes the listener along to “someplace else.” —Marc Masters